Daily Roundup, 07/04/13

The A’s beat the Cubs when the go-ahead run scored on a passed ball.
- The last game where a team won 1-0 with the only run scoring on a passed ball was exactly 20 years ago today – July 4, 1993 – when the Dodgers beat the Expos. (h/t ESPN Stats and Info)

The Braves lost a home series.
- To the Marlins.
– That’s only their second home series loss of the year.

Adam Jones finally walked again.

The Mets and Diamondbacks played 15 innings.
- In a four-game series, the two teams played today’s 15-inning game, a 13-inning game, and two other games that were rain-delayed for a total of three and a half hours.
– Overall, they played 16 hours and 40 minutes of baseball in this series. This is the longest four-game series since 1989. (h/t ESPN Stats and Info)
— Arizona scored single runs in the top of the 13th and 14th, only to have the Mets tie the game up on solo home runs in the bottom of those innings.
—- Those solo home runs were by Anthony Recker and Kirk Nieuwenhuis. Nieuwenhuis’ was the latest game-tying home run in Mets history.
—– This year, the Mets have already lost three games that lasted fifteen innings or longer.
—— Cliff Pennington had the game-winning hit. He is 8-for-11 with three RBI in extra inning games this season.
——- Speaking of the Mets and long games on the 4th of July, we’d be remiss without mentioning this game.

The Royals were shut out with only two hits through the first five innings of their game against Cleveland.
- They ended up winning 10-7.
– Eric Hosmer has eight home runs in 19 games after having only one in his first 61.

Whoa. So that was that game. There’s an additional interesting story about that Braves-Mets game in 1985, one that I learned about through a book of “Baseball’s Biggest Goofs” that I received as a kid through one of those book-of-the-month things. Apparently, with it being the 4th of July, there was supposed to be a fireworks display after the game. If you take a look at the start time in that box score, you’ll notice that it’s the very bizarre “9:04 PM”–that’s because the start of the game was delayed by over an hour due to rain. There was also an “interruption” in the third inning, the exact nature of which wasn’t detailed in my book (though I can’t help but notice that Gooden leaves the game in the third, so I figure this must be related), which added an additional 41 minutes. So while the official time of game is 6:10, the actual time between the scheduled start time and the end of the game was 8 hours and 15 minutes, resulting in a game ending just a few minutes before 4 AM. The “blooper” that got them into the book was the decision to go ahead with the postgame fireworks as planned, leading to widespread panic as citizens fast asleep in the area mistook the sound of the fireworks for bombs going off and jamming the 911 lines in the vicinity of the stadium.